Yeah, the effect of a heat wave in August is a rounding error on the million+ babies aborted every year.

I got through the whole article and it says, “Temperature’s role has probably been pretty negligible…”

So what’s the whole point of the article? The headline, of course. That’s all they wanted to put out there. Create a false impression among the empty-heads who are then going to parrot it around the water cooler like it’s gospel. I hate the MSM.

It kills me to see this blather about global warming and how meat causes cancer come out on the MSM, and then hear members of my family parroting it unthinkingly to me, days later. News blurblets do so much damage. Everybody trusts the stream of bs that is flowing by our ears all day long. Sickens me.

Heh – I didn’t even read the article because it sounded ridiculous. I was just making fun of the headline. But you guys made me feel bad by reading it yourselves, so I went and looked up the original publication:

Looks like most of the strength of their correlation is from the 1931-1969 period, when air conditioning wasn’t very common. When they project the trend to the 2070-2099 time period, they predict that births will decline by 2.6%, if the number of days over 80oF triples, and if air conditioning use doesn’t increase. The thing is, it looks like they use their temperature-fertility relationship derived for 1970-2010, but the correlation is only 2/3 as strong if you use data from 2000 – 2010 (which is far more relevant).

So basically, he’s shown that, based on climate change models that he “scaled” to hopefully improve their accuracy (which is currently too poor to be quantified), you might see ~1% decline in birthrates if the population demographics stay the same, the geographical distribution of the population stays the same, and nobody buys more air conditioners.

Also, his model does a poor job of capturing the dip in birth rates from Nov-Jan. Seems like that would undermine is theory.

But I thought global warmists would be happy with a reduced birth rate – it’s like a negative feedback to slow down CO2 generation.